Two Tables, a Storm, and an Outstretched Hand

This is Herod Antipas, a son of Herod the Great, who ruled Galilee and Perea from 4 BC to AD 39. “Tetrarch” means ruler of a fourth part, a title below king. He later asked Rome for the crown and was deposed and exiled to Gaul instead.

“Servants” here are courtiers, the men around the throne. John’s Gospel says “John did no miracle” (John 10:41), so Herod’s theory is odd: a man who worked no wonders in life is imagined working them after death. A guilty conscience supplies the explanation.

Herodias was a granddaughter of Herod the Great, so she was niece to both her husbands. Josephus calls her first husband Herod, not Philip; he may have had both names. To marry her, Antipas divorced his wife, a daughter of the Nabataean king Aretas.

The law forbade a man to take his brother’s wife while the brother lived (Leviticus 18:16; 20:21). The Greek verb is continuous: John kept saying it. The charge concerned a public act by a ruler, not a private rumour.

Mark says it was Herodias who wanted John dead while Herod protected him (Mark 6:19–20); Matthew gives Herod the wish. Josephus says Antipas killed John for fear his influence would spark a revolt, and that many Jews saw Aretas’s later defeat of Antipas as God’s punishment for it.

The only other birthday feast in the Bible is Pharaoh’s, where the chief baker was hanged (Genesis 40:20–22). Josephus gives the daughter’s name as Salome; she later married Philip the tetrarch. A princess dancing before a banquet of men was well outside respectable custom.

An open promise sealed with an oath, the kind of speech the sermon forbade: “Swear not at all” (5:34). Mark adds “unto the half of my kingdom” (Mark 6:23), the phrase King Ahasuerus used to Esther. Matthew leaves the promise unlimited and simpler.

“Being before instructed” means prompted or pushed forward. “Here” means now, at the table, before the king can think better of it. A “charger” is a large serving platter, the kind that carried meat to a feast.

“Sorry” is the grief verb Matthew uses of the rich young man going away “sorrowful” (19:22). Herod is called “the king”, though he was only a tetrarch. The Greek has “oaths”, plural, as if he had sworn more than once in the excitement of the feast.

Beheading was a Roman mode of execution, and John received no hearing of any kind. Josephus places his imprisonment at Machaerus, a fortress palace, so the feast may have been held within reach of the cell. The verse is one sentence of nine words in the King James.

“Damsel” is the word for a little girl, the same word used of the ruler’s daughter Jesus raised in 9:24–25. Two girls in this Gospel, one raised from her bed and one carrying a head on a dish. She hands it on to her mother, the one who asked for it.

John’s disciples do for their teacher what Jesus’ own disciples will not do for theirs; it will be Joseph of Arimathea who buries Jesus (27:57–60). Then they go to Jesus with the news, as John had sent disciples to him from prison in 11:2.

Verses 3 to 12 are a flashback, so “when Jesus heard of it” may mean the news of John’s death, or Herod’s words that he was John risen. Either way the ruler who killed the forerunner is now talking about Jesus. The crowd goes round on foot by the shore, and Mark says they got there first (Mark 6:33).

Mark says that on landing Jesus taught them many things (Mark 6:34); Matthew says he healed their sick. “Went forth” probably means stepping out of the boat. His plan for solitude is overtaken the moment he lands.

“The time is now past” means the hour is late, the usual time for the main meal gone. “Victuals” is an old word for food, and the “villages” are the farming hamlets scattered in the hills. The disciples’ plan is sensible, even kind.

“They need not depart” reverses the disciples’ own verb. When a man brought Elisha twenty barley loaves in a famine, the prophet said, “Give unto the people, that they may eat” (2 Kings 4:42), and his servant objected that it could not feed a hundred men.

John’s Gospel says the five loaves were barley and belonged to a boy (John 6:9); barley bread was the food of the poor. The fish were probably salted or dried, the kind the lakeside towns preserved and traded. Matthew leaves them as the disciples’ own meagre supplies.

Four words in the Greek. What the disciples think is too little is handed first to Jesus, and only then goes anywhere else. The order of hands, from disciples to Jesus and back again, is the whole method of the meal.

“Took, blessed, brake, gave”: the same four verbs recur at the Last Supper (26:26). The Jewish blessing over bread praises God “who bringest forth bread from the earth”, so the thanks is directed to the Father, not to the loaves. The grass suggests spring; John says the Passover was near (John 6:4).

“Fragments” are broken pieces, and “baskets” is kophinos, the wicker basket that the Roman satirist Juvenal treated as the typical luggage of a travelling Jew. Twelve baskets, one for each of the twelve who had said there was not enough. The feeding of 15:37 uses a different word for basket.

Only Matthew adds “beside women and children”, here and again in 15:38. The count copies the way Israel numbered itself at the exodus: “about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children” (Exodus 12:37). A meal in the wilderness is counted the way the wilderness people were.

“Constrained” is a strong verb: compelled, made them go. John’s Gospel supplies a reason: the crowd wanted to take him by force and make him king (John 6:15). Jesus deals with the crowd himself and sends the twelve away from it first.

Matthew has not yet shown Jesus praying at length on his own; the next time will be in Gethsemane (26:36–44). He goes up the mountain alone, as Moses went up alone. Evening falls on a man by himself and a boat by itself.

Many manuscripts read “many furlongs distant from the land” in place of “in the midst of the sea”. “Tossed” is basanizo, tormented, the word for the centurion’s servant “grievously tormented” (8:6). The wind is against them and they are getting nowhere.

The Romans divided the night into four watches; the fourth ran from about three to six in the morning. The disciples had been rowing most of the night. Job 9:8 says God alone “treadeth upon the waves of the sea”.

“A spirit” is phantasma, an apparition, the word behind our “phantom”. Fishermen who knew the lake at night shriek at what they see. “Troubled” means shaken or thrown into confusion.

“It is I” is literally “I am”, the words God uses of himself in the Greek of Exodus 3:14 and of Isaiah 43:10. Isaiah 51:12 joins them to comfort: “I, even I, am he that comforteth you.” Three short sentences, the middle one naming the speaker.

Only Matthew records Peter stepping out of the boat. He does not ask permission to try; he asks to be commanded, “bid me come”. His “if” is the reasoning of a man who knows that a word from Jesus is enough to walk on.

“Come” is a single word in the Greek. The verb for Peter walking is the same one used of Jesus in verse 25. For some steps the fisherman does what only the LORD does in Job 9:8.

Some important manuscripts read only “the wind”, without “boisterous”. “Beginning to sink” is a verb for being plunged into the sea, used in 18:6 of the millstone and the depths. The cry is close to Psalm 69:1–2: “Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul... I sink in deep mire.”

“Doubt” is distazo, to waver or be of two minds, literally to stand in two places. The New Testament uses it only here and in 28:17, where some of the eleven doubt on the mountain even while they worship. “Caught” means took firm hold.

“Ceased” is the verb for growing tired, sinking to rest. There is no rebuke of the wind this time, as there was in 8:26; it simply drops as they climb aboard. Mark and John do not mention Peter at all.

This is the first time disciples call Jesus “the Son of God”, a title so far spoken by the voice from heaven, the devil (4:3) and demons (8:29). Mark ends the same scene differently, saying “their heart was hardened” (Mark 6:52).

Gennesaret is the fertile plain on the northwest shore, south of Capernaum; Luke calls the lake itself “the lake of Gennesaret” (Luke 5:1). Josephus praised it as a place where walnut, palm, fig and olive all grew together, and grapes and figs could be had ten months a year.

Recognition turns into a relay: messengers go out, and the sick come in from the whole district. “Had knowledge of him” means they recognised him on sight, which suggests his face was known well beyond Capernaum.

“Made perfectly whole” is a compound of the verb “save”, meaning brought safely through; Acts uses it of Paul’s shipmates who “escaped all safe to land” (Acts 27:44). After a night at sea, the chapter ends on a word for arriving safely ashore.